How To Make Pixel Art For Your First Game

What is this series about

In this series I will be discussing the process of how I made my first mobile application, Dr. Dino, giving you tips, tricks, and tutorials on how you can get started with game development.

If you want to check out the first game I ever created, click the button below:

In this post, we will discuss how to make pixel art for your game.

How to make pixel art

What is pixel art

Because we are starting simple, we will better understand the development process by making a 2D game. This allows us to make all of are game art with pixel art. If you aren’t already familiar with it, pixel art is where you make a drawing pixel by pixel.

Although it may seem boring, or even daunting, to a beginner, just know that pixel art is pretty easy to pick up, and even the world’s most famous games started out with pixel art, such as Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, Zelda, and more.

Choose an image

If you want to make pixel art, or any art for that matter, then you must have some idea about what you want to make. 

After you know what you want to make, find a picture that is similar to your vision and paste that image into your graphic design software. Make sure that you resize the image so that it can fit within your document. reducing the size of the image will significantly blur that image. This is totally okay and sometimes even a benefit when working with pixel art.

reduce image opacity

Now with the image already on your document and scaled to your liking, it is time to rotate or change the image’s orientation to the style that you want to make your pixel art in.

Then, you should reduce the opacity of that layer, or reduce its visibility. Afterwards, create a blank layer on top of the layer with the copied image.

use the image as an outline

Using the blank layer that is on top of the other layer with the image, begin tracing that image using a pencil tool or square brush tool. to make your own pixel art.

It is that simple. If you found that this tutorial was hard to follow, I will include a video tutorial as well to help you out.

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